Tuesday, July 16, 2013

This article follows from a
previous one, The Diversity of the Mind
and the Unifying Force of Identity --Sub-Minds and Self Identity. Also
there is a more 'pop' article called Your
Mental Diverse is Composed of Many Minds.

Here are notes about the issues
and problems in developing wisdom, and how judgment and decision are connected
to the whole of the brain, to the many other sub-minds we employ.

WISDOM CAN BE TRANSITORY

This may sound incorrect but
bear with me. Your brain has many sub-minds and you can be engaged in the
behaviors of these other departments: logic, creativity, emotion etc. You may
spend time in your prefrontal region where wisdom and decision making reside,
you may then leave this area. When you are focused on creativity, you will not be
focused on wisdom. Wisdom seems
transitory.

MOMENT CIRCLING

So if you are circling about
through different sub-minds you will leave wisdom behind until you return to
its perspective through need or choice or randomness.

RESONANCE, ALL AT ONCE

Also, if you are employing many
minds at once you will find wisdom either demoted in importance or having to
compete with other perceptions such as creativity or emotion or the cryptego
(your subconscious ego). When you are engaged in projects or "living
life" you will often be juggling many sub-minds at once. This would be a
state of "resonance", as opposed to a state of focus.

But focus can of course exist in
this state because you are focusing on the problem at hand, employing all your
faculties to get a job done.

CHAOS AND CULTURAL ADHD

Unfortunately in a state of
resonance, some people have no focused activity, no goal, no perspective. In
this behavior many of your sub-minds are shooting off fireworks but there is no
work involved, the state seems to be one of chaos, lack of aspiration, stimulation
for its own sake, and entertainment. This is a kind of cultural ADHD.

WISDOM CONSCIENCE

Whether we are in a state of
resonance or focus, wisdom is something we need to have available. Even while
we are engaged in the use of another sub-mind or set of them, we require wisdom
at some level in the background so that it can intervene when it sees danger
and triggers.

So a wisdom
"conscience" is required to make us stop and think about what we are
doing and then to act by changing a course. This conscience must be ever
present or we will fail at our efforts and find ourselves in grave danger. It
is as important as the will to survive in an animal, and in Humans it is a modification
of this basic drive, taken to a higher level.

DEGREES AND FORMS OF
CONSCIOUSNESS

The necessity of a conscience of
this sort means that the brain must have degrees and forms of consciousness and
thus degrees of sub-consciousness.

A high degree of consciousness
might be the focus itself on the prefrontal region to the exclusion of others.
When we are in other neurological realms we have a reduced consciousness, it is
in the background, we feel it watching, we are aware it is there. In a lesser
degree of consciousness, we can forget it is there, but if we search we will
find it on the sidelines. In a still reduced mode, the wisdom perception seems fully
absent, we have completely forgotten about it, but it will arise through a
trigger, like a lifeguard on a beach it will suddenly appear to rescue you in a
situation of risk.

When we have no wisdom
consciousness, when we get in trouble, no one intervenes to save us.

MULTITASKING AND SINGLE TASKING

Related to the issue of
consciousness is multitasking and single tasking. We are capable of both modes.
When we are just focused on creativity or logic, we can say that is single tasking
of a sort. If we are engaged in an activity that demands many of your sub-minds,
then we will be engaged in forms of multitasking. The project will have its
focus, tasks and demands, and a combination of your sub-minds will be called
upon. The many are serving the one, the one general goal.

If you are running a difficult
meeting then you many require passion, improvisation, flashes of creativity,
logic and analysis, facts, specific emotional memories, messages from your
subconscious, intuition and more. Some of it will happen at once, for example
being emotional and logical at the same time to be persuasive. Other activity
will be more serial, in sequence. But it is hard to say what is really
happening because you may express each mind in sequence, but below the level of
your immediate focus the various minds are working SIMULTANEOUSLY responding to
the situation and to each other.

And please note that even if you
are being creative, that the right hemisphere is also working with the left
hemisphere to produce a product such as a highly logical and linear argument
that has passion and is phrased in a creative way, and perhaps pulls on myths
and ideals in the collective unconscious of all of us.

EXPERIENCE AND JOY

Experience will helps us
generate these skills, these levels of awareness. In fact, many of our sub-minds
are ever present in these ways ready to swing into action. And the more you
have developed each sub-mind, the more likely they will be in the background
and come to your aid when a situation, event or problem requires it. A
circumstance may require strong emotions, creativity, logic, accessing a key
memory etc. Conversely, if you have not developed your sub-minds and the skill
of accessing them, then you are severely disarmed.

If wisdom's toolbox is sparse,
your performance will also be sparse and wanting. If your sub-minds cannot give
you emotions, memories, logic, ideas, creations, then your prefrontal area will
have little material for judgment. Its job is collation of information,
deliberation and decision. This not only includes data from the external world
but also data from your other sub-minds including products, feelings and points
of view.

Wisdom can work with the manager
of your brain which also resides in the prefrontal region to develop other sub-minds.
Each sub-mind has its own persona and rules, so no general theory is possible,
but by entering into the locality of logic or creativity or emotion, we can
learn the viewpoint, the behaviors, the rules. Satisfaction will arise with our
growing competence. And more, joy will come to us as we savor the richness of
our neurology, the wealth of our feelings and skills and insight.

CONSCIOUSNESS AND SELF
CONSCIOUSNESS

A nascent wisdom can also work
on a plan to develop its self in a step by step way passing from the
rudimentary and naïve to the more sophisticated. Consciousness and self
consciousness are present in many parts of the brain. Our consciousness works
on an issue, and our self consciousness watches us work on the issue and offers
critique. This double view is our curse and our salvation, our stress and our
success.

If wisdom is not developed, this
paleo-wisdom will suffer from a host of problems such as:

·Making decisions
from a narrow range of alternatives put forward by the limited ideas of the
logical mind rather than making use of the creative mind to open up a range of
solutions

·Making decisions without
regard to your emotions or those of other people, these are important factors

·Making decisions
without regard to constant messages from your intuition and subconscious that
state something is very wrong

·Making decisions without
regard to your basic memories, that is, embarking on a course that your psyche
cannot support and is not prepared to undertake.

·Making decisions
without regard to your philosophic paradigm, reflecting a split in yourself as
to what is true and what is not

·And related, making
a decision while having a split view of one's own personality, being at war
with one's self

·Making decisions
without having a moral code to guide you or only a partial code

·And so on.

·And of course there
are the most basic issues about having enough information, the ability to
collate data, knowing the difference between short term and long consequences, translating
a decision to a plan, thinking in terms of scenarios and stages and
transitions, evaluating risk, balancing points of view, creating decisiveness, learning
to evaluate and correct errors in decisions, learning planning and execution
etc.

TOO MUCH WISDOM

Further, too much time spent
being "wise" may result in odd behavior. This may sound strange but a
kind of disconnected personal can evolve. In this state we can be fully free of
the benefits of other minds.

This kind of wisdom could be
called an "iso-wisdom", a wisdom that lives in isolation from the
rest of the brain. Just as we could speak of "iso-logic, iso-creativity,
iso-emotions" and so on, as sub-minds that operate on their own and
develop some peculiar activity.

Too much wisdom, if you will, is
the state of being free of the benefit of the connections to the rest of one's
neurology. The prefrontal cortex is in touch with the rest of the brain,
decision making, wisdom and overall management take place in this realm.

CONSCIOUSNESS OF THE WHOLE, AND
WHOLE CONSCIOUSNESS

Without it there is no sense of
a whole, a whole brain. Reason does not see the whole brain, creativity does
not, emotions do not. In the prefrontal locale we can get a sense of the
global. This however does not mean we can see and feel everything that is going
on, that would not be possible, that version of the "global" or the
"whole" is not achievable for many reasons. First because, our focus
can only be on one thing at a time, and even if the focus is managing the whole
then we are seeing a certain global zone. Second there are so many subconscious
processes happening that we are not aware of. In a state of
"resonance" when all is happening at once, we are managing the
connections and aiming for an overall goal, while the sub-minds are on their
own. True "whole conscious" is not a reality, the whole is too big
for that, too complex and too dynamic. At best we can get a partial picture of a
whole but never the whole picture of the whole. And we must understand that the
whole is a pattern, loops and sequences; the whole is in motion, evolving. When
we get a feeling of the "whole" we are feeling a general mood of
connection and cooperation and harmony; we are feeling energy coming from the
resonance of working together; we are in awe of the complex serial tasking and
multitasking and subconscious tasking. We make an ethereal leap to a spirit of
a "whole" and to some extent it exists but we must restrain an
impulse to idealize this state. If we keep the notion in check, it can be
powerful and motivating; if we get carried away, we enter a land of mysticism
and magic where science and technique are ostracized.

The fact that we cannot know the
whole of the whole is testament to the diversity and complexity of the mind.
Diversity constantly trumps universality. Once you think you know everything,
the Diverse sinks your paradigm.

BEHAVIORS OF TOO MUCH WISDOM

In any case, back to the
original point: too much wisdom may be exhibited as certain behaviors. When wisdom
is disconnected, it operates in some of these modes:

·Free of logic,
analysis, theory. It substitutes a peculiar kind of philosophy that substitutes
for science and detail

·Free of creativity. Wisdom
cannot create creativity, so it exists without new ideas, it thus becomes
"eternal"

·Lacking emotions. It
operates in a mode of pure "objectivity" and distance and beyond
emotion itself.

·Disconnected from
others and the world, it is free floating, alienated.

·Lacking an action
orientation, it becomes passive, it feels a philosophic despair. And it knows
nothing of the mind of action, the abrupt mind of pure doing. It cannot plan.

·Lacking ego and drive.
There is no ambition, destiny, striving.

·Lacking personality.
It is detached even from one's own basic persona and identity for there is no
such thing it concludes. All souls are one in a sort of fused and ghostly plane

·Diminished senses.
The senses are cut off, this data is not important anymore.

·Memory does not
exist. It is misinformation, ignore it. Thus we are cut off from ourselves, our
own evolution, the ground of who we are.

·The subconscious
poses a problem because it cannot be shut off, it appears in dreams and waking
states. The wisdom mind does not know what to do with it. And it may become a
substitute for living and the lives of the other sub-minds.

·Lastly, the manager
mind does nothing. This mind in the prefrontal area works with decision making
and wisdom to plan out and administer the whole show. When wisdom comes to
dominate and shut off the brain, then the manager mind has nothing to do and it
will sleep.

PROBLEMS IN OTHER SUB-MINDS

So these are problems that
wisdom has with itself.

Wisdom can also have problems
with other sub-minds. And they come in at least two forms.

The first is simply the lack of
development of a sub-mind's skill. For example, poor analytic abilities, poor
detail and linear abilities for the left hemisphere. The same for creativity.
Emotions can be poorly developed and tending to the negative. These issues
result from an improper evolution and growth of a mental department. They are
errors of lack of elaboration or "elaboratia".

A second set of malfunction has
to do with extremes of behavior, iso-behavior. In this case the sub-mind has no
boundaries or limitations.

The creative mind could be
operating without any regard to science, technique or facts. Randomness, a key
creative behavior could be so universal that basic life issues are not attended
too. Creativity works without any regard for ethics, simply for the pure joy of
it etc.

The extremes of logic,
sensation, emotions, negative memories, and the subconscious are well known so
we don't have to expound on them. In fact it seems that the history of art, culture
and philosophy is the story of these behaviors. We may see history as
NEUROLOGY.

WISDOM AND DIVERSE THINKING

There is another theme of wisdom
to address and that is diverse thinking. This thought method compels the
prefrontal cortex to think in new modes: to look at all information, all points
of view, all neuro perceptions. Diverse thinking would work for an integrated,
balanced point of view. At the same time it would recognize priorities and
stresses on certain localities of the mind. Thus the whole would be stretched
out over time as a sequence of parts – we have now a distinction between a
temporal whole and a spatial whole, the whole over time vs. the whole in a
snapshot, the whole in evolution vs. the whole as a complicated map.

Diverse thinking can help the
operation of judgment and wisdom because it shares some similar general
principles. Of course, philosophy does not create the neurology, and philosophy
cannot substitute for the science of neurology, but it can offer some help.

As life becomes more complex,
and as we have more time to focus on self growth in this age of affluence,
diverse thinking will become more and more useful.

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About Me

Innoye pronounced In-no’-eh.
Cage Innoye is an American philosopher and writer.
EMAIL: cageinnoye@gmail.com
The themes of his work cover diversity, individuality, creativity, freedom, democratic wholes, social creativity. His philosophy is about the core themes of difference and diversity. He introduces other concepts such as undifferentiation, and the Subsume to get a broader perspective on differentiation, one that is more practical.
His philosophy is called an Axxiad, it offers general principles that can be applied to a range of fields – multi-culturalism, economics, government, psychology, education, morality, the spiritual, Nature and human, international relations, leadership, strategy, organization, love, skills and mindset of individuality, self identity, time, media, personal creativity, social creativity, general thought methods and more.
His books and screenplays are available from this site.
EMAIL: cageinnoye@gmail.com